Community Newsletter: Q&A: 7/14/06 Help, my external hard drive is not recognized by my PC
- 7/13/06 6:16 PM
What worked?
by trekker75 - 7/14/06 8:36 AM In reply to: 7/14/06 Help, my external hard drive is not recognized by my PC by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I and maybe others would be interested in knowing what if anything helped get the external drive up and running.
Software?
by maduce - 7/14/06 8:50 AM In reply to: 7/14/06 Help, my external hard drive is not recognized by my PC by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I had this problem and finally solved it by reinstalling an updated version of the backup software. Before that the error message I was getting made me concentrate on the USB port - the message said that I was using a 1.1 port, but needed a 2.0 port. The USB ports were all 2.0. It turned out that a newer software version fixed this problem. My back-up drive is a Western Digital and software is Retrospect 6.5.
Since the drive is running and lights are on, I think that you have a software issue. (By the way, your Dell will have the drive manufacturer and model available in the device manager. My othe computer - a Dell - uses a Samsung HD, yours will have whatever mfg fits Dell's requirement and price!).
Loss of a hard drive
by allanco - 7/14/06 9:15 AM In reply to: 7/14/06 Help, my external hard drive is not recognized by my PC by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I bought a new 160 gig internal HD. All went well for 28 days. Then it suddenly wasn't addressable. Took it to Best Buys and they couldn't get it to respond. I was given a new replacement HD, sans my data.
I went to a computer store and bought a new mother board with RAID features. Bought another 160 Gig HD and set up a Redundant Array with a mirror on both. Now if a HD forgets its address, which is what mine did, or crashes I still have everything on the other drive. I then replace the bad drive and the mirror is restored to the new drive.
This is how I hopefully will never have the problem of a crshed drive again.
Noel
Sounds like...
by comicfan - 7/21/06 12:39 AM In reply to: Loss of a hard drive by allancoa fairly good method you have. Fault tolerence is the key and it sounds like you have it handled very well. Good advice!
Paul
External hard drive issues?
by jtomalley - 7/14/06 9:59 AM In reply to: 7/14/06 Help, my external hard drive is not recognized by my PC by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Get a Mac. You won't have to go through any programming calesthenics at all, it's 'plug & play' right out of the box.
No offense...
by comicfan - 7/21/06 12:43 AM In reply to: External hard drive issues? by jtomalleyto you and I don't mean so.. but if you Google right now, you will find more than a handfull of issues with mac and external drives dissapearing\not detected. The difference? Many more willfull people and fixes to help that certain issue, I will grant Mac that.
Paul
the simple answer
by SFergs - 7/14/06 11:29 AM In reply to: 7/14/06 Help, my external hard drive is not recognized by my PC by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
All of the very knowledgable people in this forum have probably given very good technical help.
But I own one and it is also used for outside storage. I've had this same problem, the PC harddrive won't recognize or 'see' your LaCie drive.
The LaCie hardrive is particular about just how you go about turning it off. I found this answer in the FAQ section of the LaCie website when I was dealing with the problem:
My Big Disk doesn’t mount or is not detected. The device manager lists it as unknown with the name TUSB6250 Boot Device.
Please try the following:
# Disconnect all cables connected to the drive.
# Connect the power cable to the drive.
# Connect the USB-cable. First to the drive. Then to the computer.
If the drive is detected correctly the problem was probably caused by improper shutdown or un-mount (unplugging the cable without dismounting first, etc.). When this has happened, the USB-interface needs to reset itself properly. After this, reconnection should be no problem.
http://www.lacie.com/support/faq/index.htm
Dropping...enclosures?
by cbmtrx - 7/14/06 11:49 AM In reply to: 7/14/06 Help, my external hard drive is not recognized by my PC by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Hmm...I dunno. I have a 200Gb external drive in a fan-cooled enclosure (that I use for storage only, not working files) which is actually subject to a lot less knocking around than my tower (on the floor)...
...and I've never felt the need to ''accidentally drop'' my external HD! lol
But I've encountered San's issue (on a Windows system with old USB 1.1 but with an added USB 2.0 card).
Before I wised up and bought a ''Plug & Play and hot swappable'' enclosure I had to constantly go into my system hardware maintenance, uninstall and t hen re-install the USB mass storage device.
So the only ''fix'' was changing the enclosure and then making sure to only boot up the external drive enclosure after my system had finished startup.
Hope this helps somebody!
Dropped off...
by comicfan - 7/21/06 1:59 AM In reply to: Dropping...enclosures? by cbmtrxI don't think anyone would mean to drop the hard drive, as this is why it's an "accident". They do have drop heigth ratings on some. So initially <feeling the need> to <accidentally> do something doesn't make a lot of sense,(no offense). People do drop their external hard drives all the time and have been a major cause in them going bad. I don't further know why your tower would be more subject to knocking around than an external device, but perhaps you should move the system to a safer place and put it up off the floor. Also typical USB devices are P&P.
<I had to constantly go into my system hardware maintenance, uninstall and t hen re-install the USB mass storage device.>
This would indicate a non up to date system or another issue. Also, the device in question didn't work on other computers either. I am not saying this issue may not help someone else but for the postee problem , I don't think this would apply.
Paul
7/14/06 my external hard drive is not recognized by my PC
by papawterry1949 - 7/14/06 12:04 PM In reply to: 7/14/06 Help, my external hard drive is not recognized by my PC by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I have had a similar situation recently...
I had a customer with a new Seagate 5gb
micro drive that did exactly the same thing.
He had not tried it on another computer though and when I arrived to look at the problem I found he had "TweakUI" by Microsoft installed. I found in the drives section of TweakUI the last drive with a checkmark was the cd rom.
I checked a couple more of the drives and his usb micro drive was found in "My Computer". Works fine now..
Just a suggestion for the future.
Many people don't know what utilities have EVEN been put ON their machine. Just one more thing to cause a problem. papawterry
Tweaky
by comicfan - 7/21/06 1:38 AM In reply to: 7/14/06 my external hard drive is not recognized by my PC by papawterry1949While this is good advice and a good catch, I agree that some applications can cause a headache, I felt the need to mention that Tweak ui is not installed by Microsoft. As a matter of fact, it states that it is not part of the Microsoft Os and MS will not give tech support for it and it is strictly up to the user who may want to use it, so it is not typically installed or used without the users knowledge. The unchecked drives in tweak must be unchecked and applied so I would think someone fooled around without knowing what they were getting into as this is NOT automatic in Tweakui.
Paul
Maybe you need to reformat the hard drive.
by erratum5 - 7/14/06 12:33 PM In reply to: 7/14/06 Help, my external hard drive is not recognized by my PC by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I have both a mac and a pc, and I've had this problem before, too, for my pc. I think its that, if the external hard drive's formatted in certain ways, the pc might not recognize it. The only way that I know of to get the inofrmation back is to find someone that has a computer that can recognize it (a pc store, maybe?), have them back up your information to a cd or dvd, and reformat the external hard drive so that your pc hard drive can recognize it.
Data recovery by removing magnetic disks
by scorpious - 7/14/06 1:08 PM In reply to: Maybe you need to reformat the hard drive. by erratum5If your drive has failed because of an electrical component in the hdd itself,you can get the data back by installing the metal disks into a good housing of the same model,or a quick test to see if it's just the external housing can you not install the hdd internally,below is a link to a cheap data recovery software,it's called ZAR = Zero Assumption Recovery,the link came from a news letter email from either tech republic or pc mechanic and is well priced even in NZ dollars,you may also be able to see the hdd by using a ware like partition magic ,maxtor have a free partitioning tool that could do the same i.
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/
another handy site is radified forums if link fails just use google http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi
let us all know how you get on....out
If so, this might help
by glorb - 7/14/06 1:22 PM In reply to: Maybe you need to reformat the hard drive. by erratum5I ran into a similar problem when assembling an external drive, after much searching and hair pulling , I finally ran across this online.
http://johnvu.net/blog/archives/000112.php
The site seems to be gone now, but luckily I saved a copy of the text for future use. It's come in handy several times now. This is for XP, btw.
Quoted:
-------------------
The hardest and most time consuming part of getting the hard drive to work for my cousin was to initialize the drive --
Luckily, Win XP does have a partitioning program called "Diskpart." You have to run this program at the command prompt.
To get to the command prompt you do the following sequences, the commands in quotes are what you have to type at the
prompt:
1. Click the Start button
2. Click the Run... option
3. Type "cmd" when prompted by the Run program. A command prompt shell should then appear.
4. In the shell, type "diskpart"
5. Now, if you haven't already done so, plug your drive into your USB port.
6. In the diskpart program, type "list disk"
7. One of the disks listed should be your external drive. To choose which drive to work on, type "select disk X" where
X is the drive number assignment -- 0 is the first assignment, 1 is the next and so on and so forth.
8. Now, here is where you need some forethought and planning. If your drive is large, it will probably perform better
if you partitioned the drive into multiple partitions. I am going to show you how to partition a 120GB hard drive into
three almost equal partitions. There also exists different types of partitions, so I will show you my convention in
partitioning a drive into 3 or more partitions. Think about how you want to partition your drive, decide and move on.
9. If you want to partition your drive into just 2 partitions, you probably could get away with creating two primary
partitions. And the command to do this in diskpart is "create partition primary size=XXXXX" where XXXXX is the size of
the partition in megabytes, so 40000 represents roughtly 40,000 MB or 40 GB. Do "create partition primary size=XXXXX"
once and then "create partition primary" once more to partition your drive into two partitions. Notice that I didn't
place a size parament on the second call since leaving it blank means that it will use whatever available space that is
left on the drive.
10. However, if you want to partition the drive into 3 or more, you would have to first create a primary partition
specifying the size of that primary partition and then create an extended partition of whatever is left. Then what you
would have to do is create logical partitions within this extended partition. For example, three 40GB partitions in a
120GB drive would mean I would do the following in diskpart:
a. "create partition primary size=40000"
b. "create partition extended"
c. "create partition logical size=40000"
d. "create partition logical"
You always have to create an extended partition first and then logical partitions within it (with size specifications
if you want) -- you cannot create logical partitions otherwise. Of course, you could probably get away with 3 primary
partitions, but I wanted you to see my convention of partitioning drives. After you're done partitioning, type "exit"
to get out of diskpart. Now you're ready for the next step.
11. The last part before getting to use your drive is to format the partitions. In Win XP, the partitions will need to
be formatted as NTFS. Be advised though, if you format as NTFS, you cannot use it in older windows machines. If backwards compatibility is a primary concern for you, you will have to format as FAT32. In Win XP, the Disk Management tool is what you use to format partitions. Make sure your drive is plugged in again.
Click the Start button --> Right
click the My Computer icon --> Right click the Manage option. Under the Storage menu item, there is an item called Disk
Management (choose it). This option will show you all the partitions in all available drives. Go ahead and highlight
and choose the partitions that was newly created. You will need to assign drive/volume letters and then format them.
It's as simple as that.
12. Once all this is done, safely remove your USB device (if attached to your USB port) remove the drive and reattach
-------------------
another thought
by The_Truth! - 7/14/06 1:09 PM In reply to: 7/14/06 Help, my external hard drive is not recognized by my PC by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I had a similar problem when i turned off the external hard drive before "safely removing hardware". the cure involved reformatting the hard drive, which could have been a bummer but since it was used to backup data, it just meant doing a new backup. nevertheless, i never shut down the drive without first clicking on the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon.
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